Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Colourganisms (Microbial production of custom-made, pure and sustainable anthocyanins)
Período documentado: 2020-02-01 hasta 2020-10-31
N-CHROMA is using the common baker’s yeast as a factory to produce natural colour compounds called anthocyanins. This class of colour compounds is interesting for the Food and Beverage and Colour Cosmetic industries as it has a dual function: Wide colour portfolio from blue to purple, red and orange and; Very strong antioxidant activity. The dual function and the existing anthocyanin market (€654 Mn by 2026) make anthocyanins a perfect target molecule for N-CHROMA.
Current production of anthocyanins is relied purely on their extraction from plant tissue. The extraction process is extremely inefficient and uses harmful chemicals. In fact, less than 1% of the plant raw material is converted into colour, with the rest being pure waste. Moreover, anthocyanins extracted from plant-tissues are very unstable, something that can affect the shelf life of coloured products and therefore contribute more to a wasteful, unsustainable industry. Through thorough market analysis, N-CHROMA defined a clear gap in the market and the need to create a revolutionary solution for the production of sustainable, healthy and high quality anthocyanin compounds.
Throughout the SME Instrument phase 1 grant, N-CHROMA focused on developing further its technology but also on assessing the legislation for introducing its anthocyanin products in the Food and Beverage and Colour Cosmetic industries.
The main objectives for the technology development included: Optimization of the current production system and upscaling of fermentation. For the optimization of the current production system, extensive metabolic engineering was performed including the test of different genes for increased production of anthocyanins and the production of different types of anthocyanins. Several genes showed promising results and they were included in the current production system. Also, N-CHROMA expanded its colour portfolio to include red, magenta, orange and yellow colours in its portfolio.
The main objectives for legislation included: Assessment of current legislation on anthocyanins for the market of interest and build of roadmap for market entry. Through the great coaching provided by EU, we successfully identified all legislative issues that our product may encounter and created a realistic and cost effective roadmap for market entry in the Food and Beverage and the Cosmetics industries.